Vintage 1950s-60s Black Beauty Broom Label 🧹 NOS Red Blue Cleaning Advertising Lithograph Art #117

Black Beauty Broom Label 🧹 Numbered Stock Label No. 117, Unused

Size: 5" x 3 1/2"

An unused Black Beauty broom label - Art Deco lightning and a little crown over a blank oval - with PRINTED IN U. S. A. and the design number 117 tucked into the border. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🔢 Ordered by Number

This is a stock label. Most broom makers didn't hire an artist - they picked a design out of a catalog by its number and bought them by the thousand. John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, founded in 1924, sold its broom labels exactly that way: a booklet of "40 Attractive Designs," "Order by Number Only," and no orders for less than 1,000 of any design. That blank oval was left for the broom maker's own name or grade.

📅 When It Was Printed

That lightning-bolt Deco look makes it seem like the 1920s, but stock art doesn't date a label - the same catalogs sold Edwardian ladies and Victorian peacocks right next to 1950s cartoon birds. What dates this one is the little foot line. The booklet labels of 1943-63 read "LITHO IN U.S.A."; the spaced-out PRINTED IN U. S. A. with the number off by itself is the style found on labels that carry ZIP codes, which started in 1963. Dealers who sell this exact label call it 1950s; the foot line points to the '60s. Either way, a mid-century broom label.

🐎 Why "Black Beauty"?

Anna Sewell's 1877 novel made Black Beauty one of the best-loved names in America, and broom makers knew a good name when they saw one. In a 1922 Pennsylvania court fight, the Superior Court stopped West Reading Broom Works from copying a Hamburg broom maker's bands and labels - and Black Beauty was one of the brand names West Reading was selling under.

📜 The Stories

Lore passed down among paper collectors holds that a lot of the unused broom labels around today came out of hardware-store estate sales in the Midwest in the 1970s and '80s, when a generation of longtime store owners closed up shop. And in Illinois - where Arcola still calls itself the Broom Corn Capital of the World, and nearly half the country's broomcorn once came from around there - local legend among broom-trade folks has it that some print-shop foremen kept the best labels on purpose, as proof of what their presses could do.

It looks sharp framed in a kitchen, laundry room or mudroom.